Daybreak (Le jour se leve) (1939)

Daybreak (Le jour se leve)
Directed by Marcel Carné
Written by Jacques Viot and Jacques Prévert
1939/France
Productions Sigma
First viewing/Netflix rental
#134 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] M. Valentin: You’re the type women fall in love with . . . I’m the type that interests them.[/box]

This has many fantastic elements but the story didn’t hang together well for me on this first viewing.

The story is told as a series of flashbacks as François (Jean Gabin) sits in his bachelor apartment waiting out the police and contemplating the events leading him to fire a fatal shot.  François works as a sandblaster in a filthy factory.  (Why in American films do the characters so frequently have no visible means of support?)  One day Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) comes in to deliver flowers to a foreman’s wife and François is instantly in love with the young beauty.  It seems to him a match made in heaven because they are both orphans named after St. Francis.  He starts seeing her but it soon appears that there is another man in her life.

François follows her to a rendezvous with Valentin (the superb Jules Berry) a middle-aged dog trainer with a silver tongue.  At the bar, Valentin’s ex-assistant and mistress Clara (Arletty) strikes up a conversation with François.  The two begin an on-again-off-again tryst but François continues to see and pine for Françoise.  Valentin shows up to try to break up the relationship, claiming to be the girl’s father.  Things take their inevitable course until Valentin ends up in Francois’s apartment with a bullet in his gut.

The acting in this, with the exception of the ingenue’s, is absolutely outstanding.  Gabin is at his intense working class hero best and Jules Berry makes a very interesting, even mesmerizing, villain.  Likewise, the film is exquisitely shot.  I loved the touch of the ringing alarm clock at the end.  However, I never did fully understand the nature of Françoise’s relationship with Valentin and I had a hard time buying into Francois’s desperation for some reason.  While I could understand why this is a key work of French poetic realism (and another great 1930’s French proto-noir), I didn’t love it.  Maybe it will take me more than one viewing.

Daybreak was remade as The Long Night in 1947 by director Anatole Litvak with Henry Fonda, Barbara Bel Geddes, Vincent Price and Ann Dvorak.  I’d like to see that sometime.

Clip – Gabin brooding (no subtitles, but little dialogue either)